44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 31, 2022 10:00AM
- May/31/22 10:11:48 a.m.
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moved:
That:
(a) the House denounce all forms of discrimination;
(b) in the opinion of the House,
(i) research is necessary for the advancement of science and society in general,
(ii) access to the Canada Research Chairs Program must be based on the candidates’ skills and qualifications; and
(c) the House call on the government to review the program's criteria to ensure that grants are awarded based on science and not based on identity criteria or unrelated to the purpose of the research.
He said: Madam Speaker, I would like to inform the House that I will be sharing my time with my hon. colleague from La Prairie.
I rise today to open up a debate that is as important as it is necessary for the future of science and research in Quebec and Canada.
Historically speaking, research funding has always been awarded on the basis of excellence. The scientific process takes place at the frontier of human knowledge, and advancing beyond that frontier requires someone with a combination of skills and qualities that are beyond the ordinary. It therefore seems reasonable, essential even, to direct our limited financial resources towards the individuals with the greatest expertise, towards the most promising projects. That is how we maximize the benefits for society as a whole.
In recent years, however, under the federal government's direction, this basic tenet has been undermined by a new set of equity, diversity and inclusion criteria, which advocate a funding approach based on factors related to identity and representation. While these criteria are rooted in a desire to correct certain historical inequalities that we do not deny exist, the way in which they have been implemented is perplexing.
The most obvious evidence of this trend is the Canada research chairs program, where strict representation targets were unilaterally imposed on universities. Moreover, the members of the House of Commons were never asked for their input either, since the policy is based on a decision that was made by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and ratified by the Federal Court of Canada.
The impact of the policy is starting to be felt. A number of sometimes absurd and aberrant situations have arisen in recent months, where postings for open positions automatically excluded certain candidates regardless of their qualifications. Some positions reserved for representatives of certain groups also remained vacant because no one applied.
In light of this, it is high time that the House reviewed this matter. That is why the Bloc Québécois is moving a motion today for the House to “denounce all forms of discrimination”, recognize that “research is necessary for the advancement of science and society in general”, and acknowledge that, in order to maximize benefits, “access to the Canada Research Chairs Program must be based on the candidates' skills and qualifications” above all else.
To that end, the government must review the criteria for the Canada research chairs program.
In addition to posing a threat to the excellence of Quebec and Canadian research, the equity, diversity and inclusion criteria applied by the Canada research chairs program encroach on Quebec's exclusive jurisdiction over education in three separate ways, since it is a program for hiring professors, it impinges on the autonomy of universities, and it restricts academic freedom.
I will now give my colleagues a brief lesson on constitutional history. The Constitution Act, 1867, placed education under the sole jurisdiction of Quebec and the provinces. Research is an area of concurrent jurisdiction and can therefore be dealt with by both levels of government.
In 2000, the federal government invoked its powers relating to research funding to launch the Canada research chairs program.
We were told at the time that there was no encroachment on Quebec's jurisdictions and that the goal was merely to fund research. However, if we look closely at the program two decades later, we can see that a research chair is a direct pathway to a professorship. In fact, the criteria for awarding research chairs determine who will teach in universities in Quebec and the other provinces.
In addition, the equity, diversity and inclusion requirements under the Canada research chairs program also blatantly violate the universities' autonomy.
As specified in the program policies, “if an institution is not meeting its equity targets, following a deadline stipulated by the program, nominations will be restricted to individuals who self-identify as one or more of the four designated groups until such time as the targets are met”. The four designated groups are women, racialized minorities, indigenous peoples, and persons with disabilities.
We have started seeing the impact of this policy on Quebec universities. Laval University recently posted a job offer stating that only candidates with the required skills and who have self-identified as members of at least one of the four under-represented groups will be selected. The university is basically being forced to shred certain applications regardless of those candidates' qualifications or the relevance of their research projects.
That is only the beginning. The program also states that “[i]nstitutions that do not meet their equity targets by the December 2029 deadline will have their allocation of chairs reduced”. Universities are being held hostage by the federal government, which is threatening to slash their allocated funding and reduce the number of prestigious research chairs they get. One of the cornerstones of university autonomy is the power to select and appoint professors, so the idea that the federal government could change the process cannot and should not be tolerated.
The third issue with the current policy is that it is an assault on academic freedom, which guarantees academics the inalienable right to teach or study any subject, school of thought, or theory without fear of reprisal or discrimination. However, the numerous administrative and bureaucratic requirements heaped on researchers in all disciplines include the submission of an EDI action plan that conforms to certain social sciences theories that are not universally accepted in academia or in society in general. This type of requirement impedes the academic freedom of researchers, who are forced to adhere to certain concepts if they want to obtain a research chair.
As a result, the very imposition of these criteria by the federal government for research chairs undermines several key principles and is in itself sufficient justification for a review. This being said, a quick analysis of the numerical requirements reveals the full scope of the policy's incongruity.
As I said earlier, universities have been ordered to meet representation targets by 2029. These strict, one-size-fits-all targets are applied equally to all Quebec and Canadian universities. They are based on the average representation rates in Canada of the four under-represented groups targeted by the program.
For visible minorities, the target is 22% for all universities because that is the Canadian average according to the latest census in 2016. However, what seems to have been forgotten or, worse still, ignored, is the fact that the population is not evenly distributed across the country. In Toronto, members of visible minorities represent 51.5% of the population. In Quebec City, they represent just 6.5% of the population. As it turns out, 6.5% happens to be the exact proportion of Université Laval professors who are members of visible minorities.
Where I am from, Rimouski, which is far from the big cities, members of visible minorities make up barely 2% of the population, but for the purposes of the Canada research chair program, they are supposed to hit a target that is 10 times higher than their actual representation. The federal government's one-size-fits-all solution does not take distinct regional characteristics into account and forces universities in the regions to recruit abroad rather than develop homegrown expertise. That makes no sense at all and it flies in the face of Quebec's university model, which is all about developing skills and expertise across Quebec.
Again, there needs to be a review of the federal government's policy of applying ideological math that does not work in the real world. There are concrete solutions to this nonsense. Of course, we need to increase funding for research and development. Canada is the only G7 country that has reduced its investment over the last 20 years. We need to increase graduate scholarships at the master's and doctoral levels. These scholarships have not been indexed for almost 20 years, since 2003.
In closing, I would like to clarify, specifically for my colleagues in the House, that the debate that we wish to have is not about positive discrimination in general, but about this specific, poorly crafted federal policy that is, moreover, encroaching on Quebec's jurisdiction—
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- May/31/22 10:58:14 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, my question is quite simple. Does the member believe that the most qualified people should be the ones receiving grants, or does he believe that positive discrimination is the best way forward?
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- May/31/22 12:17:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today, on this Bloc Québécois opposition day, to speak to our motion on federal funding for university research and the associated conditions.
With this motion, which I will not read again, our objective is clear: we must ensure that grants are awarded without discrimination, based on skills and qualifications, essentially on merit, and not on identity-based criteria, in the interests of genuine equality of opportunity.
This motion is particularly important to me, because universities have long been some of the institutions where I have been fortunate enough to spend some of my career. In Quebec, I studied political science at the Université de Montréal, and sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. I was fortunate to have been a lecturer at Laval University and at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. I was also able to see what was happening across the ocean because I had the amazing fortune to complete my doctorate in the socio-economics of development at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Those were probably the best years of my life.
I have very fond memories of my university days, although they were unfortunately not without a few dark periods. During their careers, young students, researchers and teachers quickly learn about the hegemony of research chairs, which unfortunately too often comes at the expense of teaching, a role that is now mostly carried out by precarious staff.
This hegemony of the chairs also lets Ottawa take control of research and impose its ideological terms and themes. This is especially true in the social sciences, where radical ideologies are often lifted directly from American campuses. Academic researchers who arrive in the middle of this have no choice but to conform, or else be pushed to the academic sidelines.
The Canada research chairs program was created by Jean Chrétien's government 20 years ago, in a context where Ottawa was sucking the lifeblood out of Quebec's public finances and then using its surpluses, obtained on the backs of Quebeckers, to invade areas of provincial jurisdiction, with education being one such jurisdiction.
At the time, Ottawa swore that they would not be intruding on education since research was not specifically under any jurisdiction. However, it is now clear that the creation of research chairs was a direct intrusion. The program is basically acting as a hiring program for professors. Ottawa is dictating to the universities the terms and conditions for hiring faculty. This situation is unacceptable and the program must be overhauled.
Ottawa is using its spending power to occupy the field of research funding. It is taking advantage of the fact that money is key and thus changing the way our universities operate. That is what is happening with the excessive demands imposed by the Canada research chairs program, particularly its requirements for equity, diversity and inclusion, which we find unreasonable.
By imposing its requirements under these research funding programs, Ottawa is not respecting the autonomy of universities. There is no reason for Ottawa to dictate conditions of employment for faculty. If Ottawa wants to take over spending power in the field of education, it should offer funding unconditionally, but that will never happen. As my colleague from Mirabel said earlier, Ottawa imposes conditions but does not offer funding, as always.
It is unacceptable for Ottawa to impose targets on Quebec universities under threat of sanctions. These universities are educational institutions where independence of thought should be at the forefront. Why can they not be given free rein to set up their own diversity and inclusion programs, without being dictated to by Ottawa under the threat of losing some of their funding?
The requirements imposed by Ottawa are unacceptable and illegitimate obstacles. It was no doubt to remedy this problem that the Pauline Marois government, with Pierre Duchesne as minister of higher education, sought to liberate Quebec's education system from Canadian ideological control by creating Quebec research chairs. That would have been a good idea.
I am being critical of the research chairs, but I want to make it clear that we strongly support permanent, increased funding for scientific research. There is no denying that Canada is unfortunately not a leader in this area. I could even say that it is a real dinosaur, and I think the best example of that is the fact that one former minister of state for science and technology was openly creationist. This was in the 2000s, not 1950. That gives an idea of how scientific research was treated by that government, and the underfunding of scientific research has been a glaring issue.
The Naylor report clearly showed that funding cuts in research and development over the past 20 years have had devastating consequences. We saw that at the beginning of the health crisis, which we are barely out of. We had no pharmaceutical industry. We had no drugs, no medical equipment, no vaccines. Worse yet, we had no adequately funded structure to begin working on developing everything I just listed. We had no capacity for rapid development.
As for the scientific research institutions that used to be the pride of Quebec, such as the Centre Armand-Frappier, they were all simply abandoned by Ottawa. I think we can see that there are consequences to living in what the Prime Minister proudly called the first “post-national” country. We have more examples. Canada would do well to put its energy into evolving out of the Jurassic age instead of trying to dictate the nature of scientific research and who is authorized to conduct it.
Of course we are in favour of including people from diverse backgrounds as much as possible. That goes without saying, because diversity is neither good nor bad. It is a reality. It is a reflection of contemporary society. Let us not forget that the Bloc Québécois once included in its ranks Osvaldo Nunez, the first Latin-American MP in the history of this parliamentary institution. The Bloc also had Bernard Cleary, an indigenous person, and Vivian Barbot, who is originally from Haiti. It also got my predecessor, Ève‑Mary Thaï Thi Lac, elected in Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot as the first Quebec woman of Vietnamese descent in the House. Today, I am the first member of the Huron-Wendat nation to become a member of the House, and I did it as a member of the Bloc Québécois. We have no lessons to learn on that score. Let us make that clear.
I would hope that, in addition to representing a diverse population, all these people, myself excluded, were chosen to be lawmakers, elected to serve as members of this Parliament, because they were, first and foremost, skilled and qualified. When people have the same qualifications, of course, no problem. We have no problem with affirmative action to right some of the grave injustices of the past that, unfortunately, very much persist to this day, but restrictive criteria other than straight-up qualifications should never be imposed. Recently, Laval University put up a job posting that did not say an equally qualified person from a diverse background would get the job. The posting specifically said “reserved”. If that is not discrimination, what is it?
My riding is home to an internationally renowned university-level institution, the faculty of veterinary medicine at Saint-Hyacinthe. Naturally, as the only French-language veterinary training institution in North America, it attracts talent from around the world. Recently, students and young researchers told me that the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council sent bursary applicants a survey asking them to disclose their sexual orientation.
Can someone explain to me how sexual orientation has any bearing on one's ability to dissect a dead bird or on the quality of laboratory testing for avian flu? Why is that relevant? I am still wondering.
As a final point, I would say that academic freedom is a fundamental struggle that comes down to the most basic independent thought, the need to reflect on things using reason. It has long been said that the purpose of education is to learn to think, not to learn what to think. The research chair system is a way to tell students what to think. It not only tells students what to think, it also tells their instructors what to think.
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- May/31/22 4:53:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I always like to hear about the University of Manitoba. It is where I went to school.
I would note that the member for Winnipeg North and the member for Kingston and the Islands both get a lot of time in the House. I would encourage them, at some point, to cede some time to equity-seeking groups and marginalized groups in their communities.
I did want to visit the topic of people with disabilities. We know that too many of these roles are not being filled by people in equity-seeking groups, and certainly, people with disabilities have even more barriers and challenges getting access to academic grants. Does the government have any affirmative action initiatives to make sure that persons with disabilities are able to equally access grants, research and funding in this country?
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